Come to the Table

Supper Onion Pie

"You're making what kind of pie for dinner?" my husband asked incredulously.  While he likes to add onions to everything, I'm the one that always says "hold the onions" when ordering a sandwich or gyro or pizza. 

But I was in the mood to make a savory pie and to use Nigella Lawson's cookbook, How to Be a Domestic Goddess.  So "Supper Onion Pie" was on the menu.

Besides, there is a big difference between raw onions on your hamburger and red onions that have been cooked in olive oil and butter for 30 minutes!

While we enjoyed trying this unusual pie, I think it's a recipe for our occasional file.  The biscuit layer was delicious with Gruyere cheese and the flavors worked well together.  It's just that, well, it's a lot of onions!

SHF #16: The Sugar Quest

This month's Sugar High Friday is all about romance.  My offering are these sweet and luscious Butterscotch Pots de Creme.

One of my friends recommended the recipe.  I have trusted her guidance in all things culinary ever since she made chocolate eclairs for a class project in middle school! 

These pots de creme are as amazing as she promised.  They include dark muscovado sugar and Demerara sugar. These sugars lift this dessert above the ordinary.  You cannot imagine until you take a bite just how pleasing butterscotch custard can be. 

This was my first experience making pots de creme.  It wasn't difficult once I completed a quest for the hard-to-find-but-worth-it sugars, learned how to prepare a water bath, and set aside the time for making, cooling, and indulging in this heavenly dessert.

Culinary Disaster Tour

I spent the last few days laughing, gasping, and saying, "oh no" aloud reading this book.  Don't Try This at Home: Culinary Catastrophes from the World's Greatest Chefs is edited by Kimberly Witherspoon and Andrew Friedman and it is a hoot. 

It is a compilation of essays by famous chefs, including Anthony Bourdain, Sara Moulton, and Gabrielle Hamilton (whose restaurant "Prune" was a highlight of our recent trip to New York City!)

Don't worry if the names of the chefs included in this volume aren't familiar to you.  After reading about their disasters you will feel like you have swapped stories with them over coffee.  To make things even more exciting, I read this book with the Zagatsurvey Restaurant Guide to New York City in hand.  That way, after reading the brief bio of the chef at the beginning of each essay, I could look up his or her restaurant and read about it before diving into the disaster.  That's geeky, I know, but it added even more to this hilarious book to get a quick impression of the restaurants being discussed.

One word of warning: after reading this, you may look at your own kitchen in a whole new light.  There are potential catastrophes lurking around every corner.  While I might not ever be in a position to drop a foie gras terrine into a vat of warm chocolate sauce or for buckets of live eels to topple over, casting the slithering things onto the floor, the potential for something spilling, burning, or going "off" is always there in any home kitchen.

The lesson of this book is, when that happens, laugh about it and move on!  A good lesson, indeed.

Chowder from 101 Cookbooks

Thank you, thank you, Heidi of 101 Cookbooks for your Rustic Potato Chowder recipe!

We made a batch of the chowder recently after coming home from the gym on a rainy night.  This chowder was perfect for a cozy supper.  The flavor was wonderful.  I especially liked the combination of onions, shallots, and garlic in the base.  We didn't have Gruyere on hand so I used Cabot smoked cheddar instead. It tasted great, but next time I want to see how the Gruyere and the potato flavors come together. Plus, with Dijon mustard, (real) bacon, and fresh chives, it couldn't turn out to be anything but delicious!

So run on over to Heidi's blog or buy her cookbook and try this chowder before the winter is over!

Irish Soda Bread

One of the cookbooks I've had the longest is Cooking A to Z edited by Jane Horn and published by the California Culinary Academy.   My parents gave it to me as a gift when I was striking out on my own after college.  It is a useful reference book, kind of an encyclopedia of food and cooking, organized alphabetically as the title suggests. 

Last week I tried a new recipe featuring Swiss Chard.  Since it was my first time cooking with it, I looked it up in this book.  Little did I know that Swiss chard "is a variety of beet grown for its leaves rather than for its root."  That explained the deep red color in the stalk and stems.

What does this have to do with Irish Soda Bread?  One of the first recipes I cooked from this first cookbook falls in the "B" section under "Baking Soda."  I don't recall why I stumbled upon it, but that's how this book works.  You flip through until you find a topic, ingredient, or technique that interests you, read the article, and then see what recipes are included with it.  I guess that for the editor Irish Soda Bread fit the bill as a recipe to illustrate the powers of baking soda.